Ever since Donald Trump descended his golden escalator and ascended to the White House, academics, journalists, and political strategists have explored why blue-collar voters support an orange-haired billionaire.
Historically, economic inequality and insecurity incubate insurgencies on the Left, while cultural and demographic dislocations fuel right-wing reactions. Why then is right-wing populism “trumping” progressive politics among Americans who feel left behind by a changing economy, looked down upon by a changing culture, losing ground in a changing population, shouted down in the mainstream media, and locked out of the political system?
Visiting factory towns, rural areas, and exurban communities—and so many diners that their motto might be “No lunch counter left unvisited”—scholars, journalists, and political strategists have sought the sources of Trump’s appeal. Is the root cause “economic anxiety” about stagnant living standards or “racial resentment” about the declining white majority? This isn’t just an academic argument: If you believe stagnant living standards are the problem, you probably think economic populism is the solution. But, if you think racism, sexism, and nativism are decisive, you’re likelier to stress democracy, diversity, and national unity, as in Hillary Clinton’s slogan in 2016, “Stronger Together.”
After ten years of this deadlocked debate, a leading scholar of right-wing populism is urging progressives to move forward. In her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, the law professor Joan C. Williams presents a complex explanation: Political polarization results from a chain reaction where economic inequalities feed social differences, thereby fusing class conflicts with culture wars.
Instead of the traditional conflict between the workers and the wealthy, Williams sees public debates deteriorating into a squabble between competing elites. Using two phrases coined by the French economist Thomas Piketty, she writes that progressives defer to the “Brahmin Left” while conservatives are dominated by the “Merchant Right.” While the “Brahmin Left” clearly consists of those pesky professional class progressives, “Merchant Right” is murkier, often referring to people with wealth and power who are more likely to have MBAs than MFAs.
For Williams, the root cause of socioeconomic divisions is “neoliberalism”—the bipartisan faith in unfettered markets that “embraced free trade, outsourcing, and deregulation while decentering unions and other job protections.” From supporting NAFTA to welcoming China into the World Trade Organization, cutting taxes on wealthy “job creators” but not wage-earners, weakening the regulation of Wall Street, glorying in global supply chains, and lecturing industrial workers about lacking the skills for the “information age,” establishment politicians have downgraded and disrespected blue-collar Americans.
Working-class Americans believed that educated elites looked down on them socially while staring down at them economically. Class conflict broadened into a culture war—a “revolt of the left behind,” with non-college workers feeling cast aside in every way. While the shared prosperity of postwar America eroded, dizzying social, cultural, demographic, technological, and occupational transformations cast many middle Americans adrift. To quote a recent movie, this change affected “everything, everywhere, all at once,” without the bedrock of economic security.
But, while Williams sees the left-behinds as central to American politics and essential to a progressive majority, she isn’t sure what to call this segment of society. While her book’s subtitle refers to the “working class,” she refers variously to the “middle class,” the “lower middle class,” “blue-collar” workers, “middle status,” and “non-elite Americans.” She’s clearer about who she means—people without four-year degrees, working for middling incomes at routine jobs, and caught between the over- and underclass. As she shrewdly observes, this segment of society is defined by “precarity”—vulnerability to layoffs, inflation, and the loss of healthcare and retirement benefits—rather than poverty.
But who’s “working class” is marginal at best. In addition to mid-level workers, her definition seems to include some supervisors, self-employed people, and small businesspeople. Since she faults liberals for using “working class” to describe “the poor,” she may be leaving out low-wage workers in sectors like healthcare, homecare, childcare, and building services who are fighting for a living wage and union representation. And, because she focuses on the “diploma divide,” she may also be excluding recent college grads in the Gen Z precariat organizing unions at Starbucks and helping the urban populist Zohran Mamdani win the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City.
Ultimately, this shifting-terminology isn’t Williams’ failing. Americans have always been more comfortable talking about cultural and even racial divisions than acknowledging class conflict. Williams’ great gift is dissecting the intersections of culture and class.
Just as the right-wing media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream from culture,” Williams suggests that culture can be downstream from economics. Rather than dismiss the left-behinds as backward, she urges “understanding not just how blue-collar truths reflect blue-collar lives but also how white-collar truths reflect white-collar lives.” The professional classes can afford to embrace novelty, draw their identity from their careers, and move across or outside the country to get ahead. But, facing insecurity in their livelihoods, working-class Americans are more rooted in family, community, and country, and are likelier to value stability over success. All this seems plausible, but it can also sound patronizing, like Barack Obama’s gaffe about small-town Pennsylvanians “clinging” to guns and religion.
With personal identity overshadowing economic interests and political ideology, how are race and racism reshaping American politics? Avoiding easy explanations, Williams writes: “High levels of racial resentment strongly predict Trump voting. But this doesn’t explain why Trump won.” Racists overwhelmingly voted for Trump. But not all Trump voters are hardcore racists, and some are persuadable populists.
Williams finds 20 percent of 2016 Trump voters were what she calls “American preservationists,” preoccupied with preserving white dominance, hostile to people of color, and out of reach for progressive candidates. But another 19 percent of Trump voters, whom she calls “anti-elites” (think of them as extending a middle finger to the bigshots, not the targets of bigotry), are no more racist than other Americans, and progressives can appeal to their economic populism. Thus, Trump won over many white working-class voters in 2016 whom Obama had carried in 2008 and 2012. Further complicating American politics, Trump gained among working-class Black and Hispanic voters in 2024, suggesting, sadly, that his racist, sexist, and nativist remarks are dog-whistles for his base without being deal-breakers for many swing voters.
As Williams concludes, the antidote for Trump’s authoritarian populism is inclusive populism. But this means more than merely “moving to the center” on social issues or “amping up” the populism on economic matters. Instead, progressives should “build a multiracial coalition that includes whites—both elite and non-elite—who are not chiefly motivated by racial dog whistles.”
To do this, progressives should understand that, as she generously quotes me: “There are two populist messages: #1. Left populism: they’re robbing you blind. #2. Right populism: they think they’re better than you. Progressives should stick with #1 and not fall into #2.” To avoid becoming the foil for Right Populism, Left Populists need to respect working-class values of work, family, community, patriotism, and the aspiration for stability and security, as well as career advancement and cultural novelty.
All this sounds like the rhetorical guidance that Center-Left Democrats have followed since Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, when he spoke of the “forgotten middle class.” However, as the pollster Milan Singh recently noted, the Democratic Party platforms in 2024 mentioned “jobs” much less often than in 2012. They mentioned “climate” or “identity-based terms” more often. With Democrats losing ground in counties and congressional districts with working-class majorities, it is time to remember and refresh these appeals.
Using voluminous data about Americans’ attitudes and displaying her gifts as a wordsmith, Williams offers issue-by-issue advice on framing and phrasings. On climate change: Stress how hard it is to work in construction in extreme heat. On immigration, emphasize that migrants are working people, striving to support their families, and, when they are intimidated or exploited, all workers are vulnerable. On green energy, say we don’t give away promising industries, products, and technologies to China.
To deflect resentment from cultural elites, attack economic elites. But do it with a scalpel, not a bludgeon, framing these attacks in moral terms. Citing Haney Lopez, a legal scholar who has explored “race/class messaging,” she recommends that progressives target “wealthy special interests who rig the rules” and “the greedy few,” rather than simply rage against “the rich” who are often respected for their success. Similarly, while conservatives blur the distinctions between corporate giants and corner bodegas, progressives should embrace small businesses, which Americans admire, while criticizing Big Business, which Americans suspect.
Summing it all up, she writes: “The key message, which progressives should be proclaiming from the rooftops—early, often, incessantly—is that we need to return to an economy where hard work pays off in a stable, middle-class living.”
Ultimately, as Williams writes, her book is about those the sociologist Theda Skocpol calls “the missing middle,” economically, socially, and politically. Unlike elite “moderates” who describe themselves as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” these voters are populists on economics and tolerant traditionalists on cultural questions. In a political system whose insiders suffer “class cluelessness,” these outsiders are up for grabs.
With exhaustive data about economic inequality, public attitudes, and voter behavior—and despite Williams’ clear and engaging writing—this book isn’t an easy read. But it is a provocative, informative, and indispensable guide to the misunderstood majority who will decide America’s future.
